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bne Tech
March 22, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 27
Belarus reports 20% y/y jump in number of online shops in 2018
The number of online stores in Belarus rose by 20% year-on-year in 2018, according to Inna Gavrilchik, the head of consumer protection and advertising monitoring at the Ministry of Antimonopoly Regulation and Trade.
According to Gavrilchik, a total of 19,400 online stores were registered in the Trade Register as
of early January. "Online trade is developing very, very intensively,” BelPAN news agency quoted the official as saying. "This is a global trend. This seg-
ment of trade has been stably growing in the last few years."
Meanwhile, the turnover of online stores surged more than 30 times in the period from 2010 to 2017, according to government news agency BELTA.
More online purchases are made on mobile phones. In 2016, mobile shopping accounted for 20-25% of online purchases. "I can suppose that today this volume is even higher," Gavrilchik said.
Russian internet major Yandex to test social network Aura
Russian internet major Yandex has started testing the beta-version of social network Aura, Vedomosti daily reported on March 15. The app is only running on mobile devices and cannot be installed on desktop computers. It is embedded into the Yandex search app and allows users to find others nearby with matching interests.
"Unsurprising that Yandex looks to strengthen its presence in social and entertainment mediums considering the strategic challenge from
users flowing to mobile," BCS Global Markets commented on March 18, while adding that "at this stage, success [of Aura] is uncertain".
According to Roem.ru, the match is based on user data previously gathered by the company, which should minimise manual data inputs from the user and ease registration to the service. Aura will also include a newsfeed with user-generated
posts from "friends" and prospective "friends" on the network.
No timeline for publicly launching the full version of Aura has yet been announced. Analysts surveyed by Vedomosti believe that Yandex will be able to collect more data on users with the help of Aura to improve its marketing offer and other services.
Second, a good social media product could help Yandex improve its competitive edge in the mobile segment. Yandex has been lagging behind Google on mobile audience with 47% versus 57%, respectively.
"Yandex is rapidly expanding its ecosystem and is penetrating deeper into the everyday life of Russians," Sberbank CIB said in a report on the company issued on March 13. In the report the analysts also noted higher user engagement and stickiness improving for media services of Yandex.